Nominalizations and participles in Swedish

Abstract

The dissertation discusses two types of participles (present and past (passive)) and two types of nominalizations ((n)ing-nominalizations and e/a-nde-nominalizations) in Swedish. The dissertation has two major goals: (I) to reach a better understanding of the 'lexical' semantics of different types of verbs by investigating which properties of the verbs survive in different types of nominalizations and participles, and (II) to pin down the exact semantic and morpho-syntactic properties of different types of nominalizing and participle forming morphemes in Swedish. My main claim is that the participial and nominalizing morphology in Swedish is semantically highly under-specified. The difference in interpretation that arises between the two participles on the one hand and the two nominalizations on the other has its base in height of attachment of the morphemes in question. However, in addition, to get the full distributional pattern and the interpretational possibilities of the participles and nominalizations one has to take into consideration the lexical specification of the verb and other "blocking" forms (irregular and zero-derived forms). The pattern that arises supports the more general idea that verbal semantics can be broken down into small semantic primitives in the syntax. Each of the derived forms can further give rise to a lot of interpretations (i.e., result and event interpretations for both participles and nominalizations). I argue that the different readings all derive from a single verbal entry, with the ambiguity arising from different subsets of syntactic and semantic features surfacing in the various readings.